What's new for CSD in fall 2013?

Yup, the dog days of August summer will be howling next week, and the editorial staff here at Corn + Soybean Digest is about to make your mailbox even hotter with our August issue.

Yeah, I know we haven’t snail-mailed you any crispy goodness (not discounting our daily website and email content) since planting season, but we’re going to brighten your day with an even better magazine.

While you may not give much of a hoot to how magazines look or how they serve up stories and what not, it’s our job to pay attention to that stuff. We like to match your passion for yield with our passion for a great word/photo/data package that you can’t put down (even after the flush and the air freshener mist).

Seriously, we spent months this spring into early summer crafting a new magazine redesign as well as refining our editorial mission – summed up best in our new cover tagline: “Think Different: Agronomics | Data | Soil | Profit.”

For starters, you’ll find a new regular column way in the back called Data Decisions - designed to help you make better decisions with data. Next, we’re launching a Q&A column that lets farmers serve up opinions on how they think different about stuff on their farm. Also, we’re building a new column called Soil Wealth to give you the latest thinking about soil health and how it can impact your profits. And you’ll see more personality profiles in our series, “Minds Moving Agriculture Forward” that we started last year.

For you mobile fans out there – be it on your phone, iPad or other device -- we’ve made all this content a lot easier to read on these devices. It’s much better than those folks who make you squint at their full website where you can’t see squat. And we’re printing more of those funny-lookin’ postage-stamp-sized boxes with crazy lines in them (QR codes) on magazine features to help you email your favorite pieces of news and views to your buddies, or to quickly transfer the story from the magazine page to your digital device.

Finally, design-wise, our cover didn’t change dramatically (aside from the new typeface and new nameplate), but the feature story layout and new typeface offers a more modern, easier-to-read publication that gives us more design freedom to truly highlight what is most important for you.

We hope you like the changes. And if you want, shoot us a message with your thoughts, ideas, kudos or other general wisdom. We love ‘em all.